“Of all the people I knew in those days he was the only one who could switch off, sit down and just stay seated, puffing away without – I’m quite sure – a thought in his head. He would just sit there, immersed in emptiness. Not that he had a clue about Buddhism.”

From an excerpt of Balla’s novella “In the Name of the Father” (V mene otca) translated by Julia Sherwood in this week’s Sunday European Fiction in B O D Y.

Balla’s writing is the Slovak selection in this year’s Best European Fiction by the Dalkey Archive Press and he won the Slovakia’s biggest literary prize in 2012 for the abovementioned novella.

In Monday’s Afterwords there will be an interview with the writer in which he discusses literary awards, his relation to his finished writing and how badly he’s been damaged by all the reading he’s done.